Soviets Offer Scientist Swap For Monitoring Nuclear Tests

May 29, 1986|By New York Times

MOSCOW — The Soviet Union said Wednesday that it would let private American scientists staff stations in the Soviet Union to monitor underground nuclear tests if Washington would allow Russians to monitor U.S. tests.

Western diplomats it was the first time the Soviet Union had expressed readiness to follow a specific plan for inspection of nuclear testing at the site.

They said the plan, though not a Moscow-Washington agreement, might serve as a model for settling the verification issue over arms control treaties, particularly those limiting nuclear explosions.

The proposal was in an agreement signed here Wednesday by Yevgeny Velikhov, a vice president of the Academy of Sciences, and Adrian DeWind, chairman of the Natural Resource Defense Council of New York, a private environmental group.

Under the plan, three seismic stations would be built in the Soviet Union to monitor explosions in the nuclear proving grounds, 90 miles west of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. Work on the stations would start right away. They would be staffed by Americans.

Soviet scientists, all of whom work for the government, would set up similar stations in the United States to monitor explosions at the Nevada proving ground.

Thomas Cochran, a staff scientist of the American group, and Frank von Hippel, a professor of international affairs at Princeton University who took part in the negotiations here, said the Soviet monitoring stations probably could be set up on private university property in California.